First uses in finance

How can you use AI to comment on budget variances without confusing plausible text with reliable analysis?

1250 € per session, excl. VAT

In short

This half-day session of 3 hours offers a guided introduction to generative AI applied to finance. Using a fictitious budget, participants write a management commentary, check the figures and identify unsupported assumptions. They leave with a corrected note and a checklist.

Why this training?

A convincing financial commentary can contain an incorrect amount or a fabricated explanation. Exploring these limitations using a simple table helps distinguish between useful rewording, calculations that need checking and interpretations that require genuine knowledge of the business. Finance involves confidential information and decisions with significant consequences. This introduction therefore prioritises supportive uses: summarising, explaining and preparing questions, without delegating a sensitive decision or replacing validation by a qualified professional. Running case study: The fictitious company « Belroche Conditionnement » is preparing its monthly review. Its table shows budget and actual figures for revenue, purchases and staff costs. An increase in purchases is apparent, but the available information does not allow its cause to be established with certainty. Transfer to the workplace: After the session, choose a non-sensitive budget commentary and identify what AI could help reword. Before any professional trial, confirm the internal rules for data handling and arrange a review by a qualified finance professional.

Objectives of this training

  • Identify three relevant supportive uses in finance.
  • Distinguish between a supplied data item, a calculation and an assumption.
  • Formulate a request for budget commentary with explicit limits.
  • Check the amounts and variances in a generated response.
  • Write a short financial note highlighting uncertainties.

Who is it for and what are the prerequisites?

Roles and tasks concerned

  • Accounting assistants and finance staff discovering generative AI.
  • Junior management controllers and administrative managers who read budget tables.

Prior skills

  • No prior AI knowledge required.
  • Ability to read a simple income and expenditure table; variance concepts will be revisited.

What you will work on

  1. Identify uses and limitations

    Objective: Understand how an assistant can help with interpreting financial information. Text generation, plausible but false responses, confidentiality; distinction between writing support, calculation and decision-making.

  2. Read the figures before asking questions

    Objective: Establish an independent reference for checking the response. Budget, actuals, absolute and relative variance; sign conventions and the case of a zero baseline.

  3. Obtain an initial commentary within clear boundaries

    Objective: Try out a simple request and improve its precision. Context, data, recipient, format; instruction not to invent causes and to flag uncertainties.

  4. Check and correct the note

    Objective: Assess the quality of the text before sharing it. Traceability of figures, separation of facts and assumptions, readability; professional validation before use.

What you take away

  • Overview of financial uses and their limitations.
  • Annotated prompt for a budget summary.
  • One-page management note, corrected and annotated.
  • Scored checklist before and after correction.

Method and assessment

  • Short instructional inputs followed by immediate practice using the running case study.
  • Individual work followed by work in pairs, with peer review of the outputs.
  • Guided group discussion: what works, what needs correcting and what remains a human decision.
  • Preparation: Arrange access to a generative AI assistant authorised by the organisation; no particular functionality is required. Provide the fictitious table and a calculator or spreadsheet; no real financial documents are requested.

Observable criteria: Every amount quoted matches the source table. ; Variances are recalculated independently of AI, with their sign and unit. ; Any undocumented cause is presented as a hypothesis to be verified. ; The note distinguishes between findings, uncertainties and questions for the finance manager. ; The checklist indicates the number of points meeting the criteria before and after correction, out of the same total..

Frequently asked questions

Do you need to be proficient in writing AI prompts?

No. The first request is built step by step from the budget table.

Can we use our actual accounts?

The exercises use only the fictitious case study. Any subsequent use of internal data depends on the organisation's authorisations.

Does AI validate the financial analysis?

No. A qualified professional must validate the analysis; no sensitive decisions are automated.

Does the note constitute investment advice?

No. It comments on a fictitious budget and does not recommend any investment or financing.

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